Stag Hill Literary Journalhttp://www.staghilljournal.com
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http://www.staghilljournal.com/2017/12/11/editors-note/#respondMon, 11 Dec 2017 15:37:29 +0000http://www.staghilljournal.com/?p=146Stag Hill Literary Journal came into existence – as a glimmer of an idea – last summer, when I was thinking back on how much I’ve enjoyed working on various journals over the years. A couple of months later, I’d been planning to talk about my idea with some of the Creative Writing MA students at the University of Surrey (where I’m currently working on a PhD), when I ran into Stewart Ferris. I’d known Stewart from Monica Ali’s master class in creative writing, which we’d both taken the prior year. I told him about my idea for the journal, and the next thing I knew, he was joining me in the effort to talk about the project. Soon after that, we had a number of additions to our team. Stag Hill Literary Journal was born.

In this, the launch of our online journal, there are some special pieces. You’ll go along with James Soderholm as he contemplates the world from a vantage point in Margate where T.S. Eliot wrote part of ‘The Wasteland’; you’ll learn about the advantages – and disadvantages – of having dogs (especially too many) from Flo Heap; and you’ll envision Saima Afreen shaking the Baltic Sea from her hand. There are also stories, observations, and beautiful visions from: Jhilmil Breckenridge, Pieter Van Winkle, K. Alexandra R., Mark Finney, Trevor Datson, Emily Byfield-Riches, and Broc Silva. We hope you enjoy them all as much as we do. Please watch the website for more content, and stay tuned for the first of our bi-annual print editions, Issue 1, coming in spring 2018.

When I heard there was a film called “The Waste Land” on offer next to the Turner Contemporary in Margate, I had to go. T.S. Eliot spent roughly one month in Margate in September, 1921. His wife Vivien was in poor health and Tom was also suffering from nervous depression. Margate was meant to supply bracing sea-air and some inspiration for what was to become his masterpiece, The Waste Land, published in 1922.

So one Saturday in July I hopped on Southeastern Rail and made the trek to Margate, about twenty-five minutes from Canterbury. On the train ride, I read part three of The Waste Land—Eliot called it “The Fire Sermon.”

The river’s tent is broken: the last fingers of leaf

Clutch and sink into the wet bank. The wind

Crosses the brown land, unheard. The nymphs are departed.

Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song.

The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers,

Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends

Or other testimony of summer nights. The nymphs are departed.

And their friends, the loitering heirs of city directors;

Departed, have left no addresses.

I think of Max Weber’s “disenchantment of the world,” where both the landscape and our hearts have been demythologized. I walked from the train station to the Turner Contemporary and behind it found a tiny (black box) cinema, about the size of a small bedroom. I sat on the floor. The film is by Mark Wallinger, who won The Turner Prize in 2007.

It is a film showing the beach-front and horizon just beyond the smallish hut serving as cinema. The film was shot the day before. Each day the film shown is a medium shot of the sand and the horizon as they appear the day before. The camera does not move. As I watch the film, a woman who serves as the attendant spilt Eliot trivia over me in order to give the film a pedigree. The film is meant to be about the disorientation of time and space in modern life and yet its stasis does nothing to vibrate my spidery web of the spatio-temporal. Eliot staring at the same sea in 1921 wrote some brilliant fragments for “The Fire Sermon.”

On Margate Sands

I can connect

Nothing with nothing.

The broken finger nails of dirty hands.

My people humble people, who expect

Nothing.

Mad Europe—and his mad marriage—hurt Eliot into poetry. But Wallinger seems to have little imagination for the dislocations and dissonances that makes Eliot’s work so compelling and disturbing. I joke to myself about writing a message in the sand that would have to be filmed and shown the entire next day:

THE TIME WASTED

I spent about ten minutes watching the film and waiting for a seagull to fly by. Most of the gulls are so bloated with discarded, oily chips they can barely struggle into flight. If I sat there for an hour or so I probably could see the water slightly change colour. Or maybe a tourist would actually walk down the beach. One could argue that the film’s static, minimalist approach frustrates our conventional expectations and forces us to be patient and really look at the undulating sea and the way it is both always the same and constantly changing. That mesmerising paradox is elemental, like gazing into fire (rather than a fire sermon). But how odd it is to be walled in a tiny dark room to watch a film of yesterday’s sea when today’s sea is dutifully slapping the shore (it has no choice) just beyond the cinema. The avant-garde film was so tedious that it made a realist of me. And what would Turner have thought of the film’s taking off the prize bearing his name?

I left the Turner Contemporary and made for Angela’s Cafe near the sea-front. Inside I was surrounded by a family of squalling brats whose behaviour makes one want to throw everything—cups, tables, cod, kids—through the front window. I kicked to life the pedantic professor in me and thought that Eliot would have listened to their sordid conversation—a tumorous sewer of clichés—and created a scene from The Waste Land, the pub scene in “A Game of Chess,” for example. As the waitress approached I rearranged my pale, ovoid Swedish features in what I hoped was the haughty countenance of a visiting Persian Prince. She took my order without once noticing my implausible face. The coffee arrived five minutes later and tasted like oily soy sauce. I covered the table with Eliot materials (these fragments I have shored against Margate’s ruins?) and held a tutorial with myself. I often flirt shamelessly with my own mind to kill time. I examine A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts Including The Annotations of Ezra Pound and pore over the revisions of the “On Margate sands” part of The Waste Land. Pondering Eliot’s relations with his wife and how much of the poem refers to the strained nerves of their marriage, I recall Jacques Lacan’s bottomlessly-depressing definition of love: “Love is giving something you don’t have to someone who doesn’t want it.” That sounds like the caption to 80% of Tracey Emin’s work. The weight of Margate and Lacan squat like fat seagulls on my dying heart so I pay and bill and leave, ready for the next splendid, sea-side disappointment.

I strolled in a spitty rain down the coast and approached the Victorian shelter where Eliot pondered and penned part of The Waste Land. It is a large, wrought-iron structure with long benches inside and with an enormous overhanging roof. The place was overflowing with families from the American South. A native Virginian, I recognized their accents as originating in South Carolina or Tennessee. Words drool from their mouths like dark molasses. A mom to her boy: “Baaaaaahhbeee!—nowww don’ch’y’all go swimmin’ in tha’feelthy ohhshun!” Kids running around yelping as if wasps had flown up their anuses. Helpless parents trying to manage them, like herding cats in a hurricane. I try for about five seconds to imagine a solitary T.S. Eliot sitting there, plucking his mandolin, staring out to the English Channel, connecting myth, religion, philosophy, psychology, literature and harrowing forms of impotence in order to depict both individual and cultural disintegration. The line “I can connect nothing with nothing” is the voice of madness, the opposite of the fecundating poiesis (‘making’ from the ancient Greek ποίησις). Great poets and novelists teach us how to “only connect.” But among the throng of tourists, it was impossible to absorb Eliot or to turn the gloomy seascape to account. Turner would weep. The sun, for shame, would not show itself. Margate: ‘a heap of broken images’, the town that loves to disappoint you. Before leaving I spied a girl about fifteen years old sitting on a bench packed with people. She gazed out to the Channel, her face a relief map of despair and loneliness, her eyes vacant and detached. I know that look. I regarded her for a moment, hoping not to catch her eye. She had beautiful, mahogany-coloured skin. Her arms hung like ropes and fell into the dead lap. She seemed lost in her life, already a weary pilgrim for whom every month was as cruel as April, breeding lilacs out of her dead Margate. I could not re-Joyce her into epiphany. Portrait of the Failed Artist as an Ageing Professor.

In one of those miserably garish seaside arcades called DREAMLAND (a would-be antidote to Margate as a wasteland), I play two games of air hockey against myself, whacking the goddamn puck so hard it either takes flight or rebounds into my own goal. I leave DREAMLAND. Margate is so tired and beleaguered that one begins to see why people come out of the rain to spend a few pounds in order to murder an hour in venal idiocy. Only poets can survive outside.

On the walk to the train station, I notice a row of obligingly-seedy hotels and B&B’s. A particularly ramshackle place is called—because God is an Ironist—The Happy Dolphin. From an upstairs window you would be able to see Eliot’s shelter. It’s a good place to contemplate Margate sands and think about Eliot’s poetic grail quest to connect everything with everything: perhaps the only way out of the wasteland of modern life. The secular redemption of poiesis.

As Nietzsche observes, “We have art so that we may not die of the truth.” The Happy Dolphin is also a good place to hang yourself.

James Soderholm taught for 22 years, mostly at American universities. He has been living in Britain for the last 14 years. Like Emma Bovary, he wants to die but he also wants to live in Paris. You can see more of his work in in Stag Hill Journal print Issue 1, coming in Spring 2018

Karbala – A city in Central Iraq known for the famous battle of Karbala

There’s No Lamp in the World Tonight

Darkness is a refugee

in our shadows

it’s a little child that wakes up

in the middle of the night –

remembering the rose chintz of my lamp

and a milk jug my grandfather brought home

from Germany during the World War

underneath the rose-gold hue was written Rosenthal

which I till now wrongly read as Rosencrantz

a name for treachery planted inside us

when the cities would be lumps of coal

under silent sirens

women noiseless like leaves

their sewing a story folded for tomorrow.

My article bled today

with a bloodshot eye

holding a pellet-stricken map

in its iris.

There’s power-cut in my body

my poet-skin refuses to see the calligraphy

that soft shadows of net curtains offer

or how the teak cupboard bends into a smooth curve.

Outside the red moon

is broken into shards

a sliver of its hot glass falls

inside my inkpot.

Everything turns into vapour

this country, he, me, you

and darkness, too

crying in its chains

forever blamed

for the heads of dead soldiers

murdered babies or mutilated women

now all disappeared in a blind universe

where stars are torch lights

blown out on broken cheeks.

The darkness is ink inside a jug of milk

darkness is the well today

everybody is drowned in

and then silence,

stone black

the buds forget to bloom

your breath once fire is cold

the wicks your eyes planted in the sky

are drowned

etherized their lights blink

their tips lit up with blood;

I pluck one wick

and set the carcass

of the moon

on fire.

Let there be light!

Saima Afreen is an award winning poet, who also moonlights as a journalist with The New Indian Express. She has been part of different literary festivals and platforms such as GALF, TEDx VNR-VJIET, Prakriti Poetry Festival, Sahitya Akademi Poets’ Meet, Helsinki Poetry Jam among others. She was awarded Villa Sarkia Writers Residency, for autumn 2017 in Finland, where she finished working on the manuscript of her first poetry book titled ‘Sin of Semantics and Other Poems’.

To dream of a dog wearing a hat means that you are projecting an aspect of yourself onto someone else. Do not do this! Be aware of what the dogs are trying to tell you. If you listen to the dogs carefully, you will find that they are very wise. They will tell you that you ought to be nicer. They will tell you that you ought to stop being so demanding. They will tell you that if you want real friends you need to start running in a pack.

If you tend to walk into crowds and feel like everyone looks a bit like you, be careful. Also be careful if you think that crowds are actually real. And remember that crowds are not packs.

There are many advantages to dogs. For example; they have been clinically proven to help with depression. They will bark if someone is trying to break into your house. If you suddenly lose your sight they can function as your eyes. All of these things could happen. All of these things will be easier to prevent/bear if you have a dog.

However, it is a misconception that a dog will love you unequivocally. I’ve met lots of dogs that are actually pretty critical.

One of my neighbours once went blind from accidentally ingesting a chlorine based kitchen cleaner. Her children made her buy a dog so that she wouldn’t get run over or bump into people when she was walking down the street. Unfortunately, she was allergic to the saliva dogs produce. She told them that she would be happy with just a white stick but they wouldn’t listen. Now her bathroom cabinets are full of antihistamines and boxes of man-size tissues.

All of the dogs used to be so small that they could crawl out of my eyes but lately they’ve been getting bigger and bigger. Whenever I try and go to the bathroom to brush my teeth, it is full of greyhounds that I have to climb over.

Another advantage to packs is that you are three times less likely to get mauled/eaten by another stronger animal. This is particularly advantageous if you feel like you are a sickly person.

My neighbour’s dog was a mongrel although her children told her that it was a pedigree Labrador. They told her lots of things that weren’t true now that she couldn’t see. The dog she had was good at making sure that she didn’t get lost or hit by cars but it wheezed a lot. Her children liked to think that it wheezed out of sympathy for her allergies but it was actually just due to poor breeding. Also, it had wary eyes.

After a while it may get to a point where there are just too many dogs in your house and they are all trying to tell you different things and you can’t hear anything anymore. Then you might have to get them to leave. Usually the dogs do not like being told to leave very much because they will have grown attached to you. They might put up a fight. But if you get on your knees and growl really loudly they will run away.

Then there will be no dogs in your house anymore.

I think when I last looked in your eye I saw a really tiny dog trying to escape.

Flo Heap is a twenty year old student, originally from London. She currently lives and studies in Dublin. Her short story ‘Cannibal’ will be included in Stag Hill Journal print Issue 1, coming in Spring 2018.

Jhilmil Breckenridge is a poet, writer and activist. She is the Founder of Bhor Foundation, a mental health charity. Her areas of work are mental health, domestic violence and trauma. Jhilmil is currently working on a PhD in the UK and her poetry and other writings have been widely published and anthologised. She tweets at jhilmilspirit.

But I am not irrelevant. I am a human on planet earth, and I am hurting. Even with all my privilege, I am hurting. I am a human in North America, amidst a craziness that seems to have no end, and I am hurting. I have been impacted in ways close to home.

Since moving to this small town in rural Colorado, I have had a hard time making friends.

Some people have been friendly and welcoming.

Others have been steely or private.

It hurts.

We even have a whole chat room in this town where people attack each other politically – neighbors – and get into whole arguments, rather than try to meet each other and at least argue about useful things, like what tractor to buy or how to spend tax dollars. This is how it is in rural America, it’s scary.

It hurts that we all must do what we must do, guard our tribe, protect our business, shelter our children, bolster our investment. I feel myself inside this wheel of utter meaninglessness this night, and I wonder if I am alone there.

What I’m lamenting is the ways that we are forced inside our own silos of sadness, protection and privacy. I mean, I want my privacy. I choose my privacy. But tonight it stings. Tonight my privacy stings. I wish we could all find a way out together.

Pieter Van Winkle is the founder of the Soul-Directed Change Institute, where he ‘help[s] people explore and embody lives of deep meaning, by knowing themselves more fully and taking responsibility for what they find’. He lives in Colorado.

“Come On! You’ve got to eat it! If you don’t you get shut out – forfeit’s a forfeit! Do it! Do It!” I looked at Skivver as he began to intone the forfeit rite.

“Do it! Do it! Do it!” The others took up the chant – Dinger, fat, four-eyed, shiny. Scun – a writhing little ferret with ferrety eyes and yellow ferret teeth. Baz – big Baz – with big hard knuckles and a big hard head. They all gazed at me with a rapt intensity, an animalistic fervour as they chanted.

“Do it! Do it! Do it!” I looked down at the twig on which a writhing brown slug was impaled and I felt a sheen of sweat prickle my upper lip as I hesitated and retched and gulped at the same time.

“He’s only going to hurl!” cawed Baz delightedly.

“No I’m not! I’m just admiring it!” I knew the words were unconvincing as soon as I said them but I had to pretend or be chucked out of The Shed Gang and The Hideout for failing on a forfeit, a worse fate than death for a skinny twelve-year-old Jewish boy living in 1973 Tottenham with no other friends.

I wasn’t crying – yet – but I could feel the involuntary pucker of the mouth and the spears behind the eyes. Any more delay and it would be too late! Closing my eyes I thrust the slimy sacrifice into my mouth, chewed down hard on the gristly thing and swallowed as quick as I could. Masking another retch, I put on a big smile, smacked lips sticky from the glistening slug mucous and said “Mmmmmm. Delicious!”

“AAArrrghhhh!!! He ate it! Sprat ate it!” roared Dinger as he and the others collapsed in lung-sucking, hysterical mirth on the musty damp floor of The Hideout.

“Sod off! Only ‘cos you’re too scared to.” I shouted, hating my gang name but stuck with it as it had been bestowed by Skivver. Because custom demanded it, I leapt on to them, flailing with my puny fists, connecting a couple of times before being half-stunned by a Baz special on my ear and a stealthy Scun elbow in my stomach. We disentangled, panting. Honour was satisfied. I had survived another trial in the Shed Gang.

I was allowed to chug down some flat Lucozade and Skivver handed me a couple of Spangles, a bit fuzzy from over-exposure to jeans pockets but welcome nonetheless. Skivver was the undisputed leader of our little group. It was he who decided what we would do each day, he who decided if any transgressions of his own unwritten laws had been committed and he who, after all, had found The Hideout.

Hidden behind ivy in a forgotten shaded corner of the allotments it stood. It had once been somebody’s shed but that somebody had not been back in a long while and the sour little patch of earth it stood on had not seen a hoe or a rake for a long, long time. You couldn’t even see it very well. Mr. Symonds who had the only plot nearby on the little dog-leg of land away from the main allotment was as short sighted as the moles he did constant battle with as they made mounds in his precious square of land. To us it was a haven. Dry enough in the rain, as safe from marauding rivals or grown-ups as it could be and a delightful treasure trove of weird rusty implements, bottles, pots, shelves, old sacks and a precious store of candles. We had sworn a blood oath never to reveal its whereabouts and we held Skivver in such awed respect that the oath held.

Dinger looked at the Timex strapped tightly to his fat wrist. “Its nearly five. Better go,” he said. We knew the rules – back by teatime and try to avoid too many clips over the ears from assorted elder brothers and sisters. Or worse when the various Dads, step-dads or dubious uncles turned up and lorded it over their tiny kingdoms. Or worse still – Baz was big but he wasn’t as big as his Mum’s new boyfriend and it showed in the puffed lips, black eyes or carefully-nursed ribs. These things were never spoken about. Nor were Scun’s pained silences and sulking tears. He had an uncle – Uncle Nigel. I had met him once and I knew. I knew as soon as I saw his eyes and how he looked at Scun and then at me. Both of them were on The List, kept by Skivver and there they would stay until we were able, if ever, to exact revenge.

We emerged carefully, blinking in the washed out twilight of a drizzly April Tuesday. A whole week left of the holidays before a return to School and its own particular set of perils. We edged along the narrow gap behind the back of The Hideout and out onto the overgrown path by the corner of Mr. Symonds’ plot. He was there, his big soil-encrusted hands clutching a garden fork as he jabbed away at his stony patch. He looked up, took his tweed cap off his bald head, wiped a streak of dirt across his forehead with the back of his hand and squinted at us. “Aright lads?” He had a funny accent like the ones off Coronation Street but other than a greeting, he didn’t bother us and we therefore didn’t bother him. How he could be unaware of The Hideout, even with his eyes, we couldn’t work out. We waved silently in acknowledgement as we went past and Mr. Symonds grunted and returned to his fork-jabbing.

We scrambled out onto the lane and went our respective ways. I headed home to an unnaturally tidy, furniture polish-scented house, a boring little sister, a spaced-out, faded mother and a 14 year old brother who specialised in Chinese burns. Dinner would wait until Dad was home from his accountancy firm and I wondered idly whether live slugs could be seen as Kosher. Probably not.

Everyone in The Shed Gang was doing something else the next day so there were no plans to meet but at around 4 o’clock I was looking for my Swiss Army penknife and realised that I must have dropped it in the scuffle at The Hideout. Unwilling to risk my most important possession being snaffled by Skivver or one of the others, I decided to brave the Tottenham streets alone and get it back. A mercifully uneventful journey saw me sidling down the path off the lane. As I was creeping down the overgrown route to the shed, I heard sobbing. I pulled open the door and, in the gloom of the dark interior, I could just discern Scun, hunched up in a ball in the corner. He raised a tear-streaked, terrified face to me, hissed “Get out, Sprat. You’ve got to get out!” He looked past me as, too late, I heard a stomp and a rustle and then a thunderclap and stars as something caught me a swingeing blow on the side of my head. I fetched up sprawled on the floor, my back painfully connecting with one of the old wooden seed racks. I squinted up, head throbbing. Looming over me stood Uncle Nigel, his slitted, calculating eyes glaring at me and a twisted self-satisfied grin spreading across his greasy, stubble-stained face.

“Well, look at this! Hello pretty boy. Come to help Derek have you?” I saw Scun edging towards the door. Uncle Nigel didn’t. As he advanced on me, I watched in despair as Scun legged it out of the shed. Uncle Nigel grabbed me fast and hard by the throat and hauled me up ragdoll-like towards his rancid mouth. “That’s better – you and me, we’re going to play a little game. A little secret game.” I went frozen cold and weak with fear. He threw me down and turned me on my front. I tried to yell but I couldn’t get any words out. I was barely even able to breathe as he pulled my jeans and underpants down. I mewled in outraged protest and he covered my mouth with a hand that smelt of cigarettes and shit. He then pushed me down into some sacking on the floor and I heard him fumbling with his belt with his free hand. I squirmed with all my might but his knees held me pinned and, terrified, I started weeing. Suddenly there was a sickening clanging thud and a snap as of a broken stick and the sound of something heavy hitting the floor. The weight trapping my legs was released and I scrabbled back and turned round, hauling at my jeans, trying to get them over my urine-soaked thighs. Mr. Symonds stood there, holding a heavy shovel. He was bending towards Uncle Nigel who was now an inert shape on the floor with his head bent at an unnatural angle and crushed into a shape no head should be in.

He touched his fingers to Uncle Nigel’s neck and nodded, his face expressionless. “Well lad?” He said calmly. “Did he hurt you?” Wide-eyed I shook my head, then realised it was still ringing.

“He hit me here” I managed, indicating my still-sore temple.

“Reckon you’ll be ok with that. Nothing else?” I shook my head again.

“How did you know…?” I began.

“Your mate.”

Scun. Thank God for that. He hadn’t deserted me.

“Went haring off as soon as he told me, though.”

“He’s gone to fetch Skivver” I said. “He lives near the allotments.” Mr. Symonds looked worried at that, then looked down again at the body.

“Don’t think anyone will miss that piece of shit. Do you?”

Again I shook my head. “No. Least of all Scun – Derek.” Mr. Symonds sighed with what sounded like resignation.

“Well, lets think about what to do next.” At this point Scun reappeared with Skivver. Both gazed at the body in horrified contemplation. Then at me.

“You ok?” asked Skivver. I nodded, still having difficulty saying much. Though I did manage “Thanks Scun.”

Mr. Symonds looked down at us, then again at the body. “Come with me.” It was as much a question as a command but obediently we followed him out and over to his shed in the corner of his allotment. He went in, rummaged and emerged with a fork and a couple more spades. He hesitated a moment, then said, “Fancy a bit of digging?” We looked at each other, then at him. Wordlessly we grabbed the implements then began to dig where he indicated, at an empty spot between some raspberry canes and a row of unidentifiable plants. We dug and dug that afternoon alongside Mr. Symonds. Not a word was spoken. I watched the corded muscles of his forearms digging swiftly and efficiently in the reluctant soil, a faded blue-green tattoo of a dagger between a pair of wings just visible below a rolled-up sleeve. We cleared the earth and dug and cleared and dug and cleared. At long last there was a pit about five feet deep. Again saying nothing, Mr. Symonds went back to The Hideout and re-emerged dragging the body on a large piece of sacking. He dumped body and sacking in the hole and we piled the earth on top. He then turned over the earth all along the same row so it all looked the same and pulled a rake over and over across it all while we cleaned the tools in his water butt.

“Don’t think anyone needs to know about this, do they?” he asked as we finished drying and putting away the tools. We all agreed with this and he solemnly shook each of us by the hand. Then he just went back into his shed and put his kettle on his little primus stove. We looked at each other and walked off towards the path. “Aright lads” he called to us and we waved our farewells as we left.

It was a subdued trio that made its way back to the lane. Finally Scun piped up. “I fucking hated him! I hated that fucker! I ran away when he came for me and he followed me to The Hideout. I never saw him until he was on me – then he heard you coming and hid-” he stopped abruptly. Skivver said

“You did great, Scun. And you, Sprat. We just need to keep quiet.”

“Do we tell Dinger and Baz?”

“‘Course we do! And we’ll swear a blood oath on this.” he added with a distinct note of relish.

I returned home, hurriedly stuffed my dirty clothes into the wash basket and cleaned up. I was in disgrace for missing supper and worrying my mother almost out of her stupor and told them I’d picked up my bruises from scrapping with my mates.

Scun’s mother reported Uncle Nigel missing but to everyone other than us, he seemed to have disappeared into thin air. No one in the neighbourhood was inclined to be very helpful to the police and though they conducted a cursory search of the locality, a freshly-dug allotment was hardly going to raise their suspicions and they concluded that he had gone off elsewhere and good riddance. His proclivities were not exactly secret and Scun’s mother seemed more relieved than anything else at his absence. Meanwhile, we had sorted out The Hideout, clearing away the signs of a struggle, ripping out the bloodstained planks we couldn’t clean and chucking them onto Mr. Symonds’ bonfire.

At the next gang meeting, we swore our oath and Skivver ceremoniously took The List out of his back pocket and silently crossed off Uncle Nigel’s name. A few months later, Mr. Symonds had bumper crops of raspberries and carrots.

Mark Finney was a banking lawyer in the City until 2016 when he decided to do something else with his life. A serious illness and a nasty heart op were a wake-up call and he left work for good in July 2016. He has written poetry and stories for most of his life. He sometimes showed them to other people. He is currently studying for a Creative Writing MA at Surrey University, is now sharing his work a lot more and may even try to get some of it published.

I sat with him while he waited for the train that would take him south to your house. Our hands were entwined, seeking comfort and warmth. He played idly with the ring on my left hand, looking away before asking me a question.

“Who gave you your ring?”

He was worried about my answer; he always refused to look into my eyes when he wanted to hide his emotions. His eyes were like two windows that displayed every thought behind them.

“My aunt made it for me.”

He turned his head to look at me. He smiled and then looked down at the small ring he was still fiddling with. “It’s beautiful.”

I smiled. He was so relieved by my answer, but it was ridiculous to think about his worry. My possible ring-gifter caused him pain, and yet he said nothing to comfort me about our current location, our current activity even: waiting.

I felt like I was waiting for a train that would never come. But the train to south London was set to arrive in two minutes. His train was almost here. Your train.

He squeezed my hand tightly, looking up at the timetable. His fingers slackened and he wiggled his hand out from underneath mine, reaching to fix the buttons on his coat.

“My train’s almost here…” He stood awkwardly and looked back at me, waiting for me to stand.

It was raining again.

“Thanks for waiting with me.” He reached out to hug me, and I gave him half a hug, not wanting him to feel my pounding heart.

The train roared in, slowing until it finally stopped.

“Right, get home safely,” he smiled.

I nodded blankly.

His eyes showed a confusion at my mood change.

“You too.”

And he realised, but the whistle for the train echoed.

I turned around to walk away, leaving him standing in front of the open train doors. They beeped to notify everyone of their closing, and finally the train started up again.

I held my breath and turned back around.

He was on the 23:18 train to south London. He was on his way to your house, and I just kept his hand warm while he waited.

K. Alexandra R. is a 24 year old PhD candidate at the University of Surrey studying citizenship, identity, and education. She spends most of her time selling soap in a tiny Guildford shop, writing poems on receipt paper, and listening to Schubert’s symphonies.

The two trees grew tightly together in a quiet courtyard in the presentable quarter of Cochin, an enclave reserved for tourists along with the tuk-tuk drivers and hawkers that symbiotically stalked them. All living things age quickly in the thick moist Keralan air, but even so the height of the two trunks was so great that the modern colonnade with its boutiques and café bars must have been built around them. Whitewashed walls and a polished marble causeway surrounded a small pebbled rectangle in which the trees now stood, but the architecture offered no clues at all as to where in the world the beholder might be.

The jackfruit was by far the slimmer of the two, its greenish mottled bark stretching bare four metres or more upwards before dividing and subdividing into a weave of slim branches which in turn held a clutch of thick, strong leaves, each the size of a man’s hand, camouflage green in colour and waxy as if they had been individually varnished in a backstreet workshop.

But the mango had the girth of a Pehlwani wrestler. Its dark brown, reptilian bark was split in places, offering a glimpse of yellowish wood beneath, while meaty branches surged up through the tangle of jackfruit leaves – or perhaps the jackfruit had simply grown around them. In any case, from the first balcony upwards the two trees were enmeshed as in a desperate lovers’ clench. So tight was the embrace that from the corner table at which I sat alone, it was not possible to make out the smoky grey sky.

My wife was now browsing the rails of richly-coloured scarves and tunics in one of the glass boxes that enclosed the courtyard, leaving only three people within it. I nursed my iced watermelon and ginger, idly glancing from phone to camera and then to the slow scene beyond. With two weeks of cycling in my legs I didn’t feel like joining the viscous tourist throng that lapped along the Cochin alleyways and around their identical boutiques.

A few tables away and slightly to my left sat a businessman, or so I assumed him to be. About forty years of age and smartly dressed in white cotton trousers and shirt, he sat drinking tea poured from a white china pot. His legs were crossed in the self-assured pose of one used to giving orders. Western business people need to give the appearance of doing something even when they are not, but this man simply stared into his own thoughts, moving only once to light a cigarette from a pack that lay beside his cup and then resting his hand back on the table, the cigarette hovering over the table edge so that the ash occasionally fluttered down onto the marble. I didn’t see him draw on his cigarette after that first inhalation.

He certainly paid no attention to the third person in the tableau – a local woman probably past forty but otherwise of indeterminate age, silently progressing her impossible task. She wore a black top and long dark blue skirt: a widow, then, or so it first seemed to eyes which had become used to the bright colours of immaculate saris in even the poorest areas of the country. And then I momentarily recalled the Hindu funeral pyre just thirty or forty metres from the road as we passed on our way out of Tamil Nadu and towards the Western Ghats. No sombre attire there: the mourners were clad in white formal wear like that of the businessman, but with orange and yellow garlands around their necks that bobbed gently as the men returned homewards through the blood-red petals that had tumbled from the hearse and the shroud.

Then again, perhaps the woman was a Christian in Catholic Kerala, and perhaps the priesthood encouraged this joyless garb.

A gust of wind, unfelt in the courtyard below, shook loose a handful of the yellowing, pointed mango leaves from their perches high above and sent them spinning down onto the shiny grey pebbles. This, it became apparent, was the woman’s job – to sweep these leaves away lest the guests of the juice bar or the coffee house or the trinket boutiques should feel in any way inconvenienced. To assist her in this task she had thee things: a switch broom made of straight twigs, a black plastic bag, and a hairnet, in case any of her greying hairs should impertinently fall onto, say, a table.

She was not tall, but nonetheless she was obliged to bend to her task since the ineffectual switch of twigs would not otherwise have reached the ground. Methodically she worked, sweeping the leaves (all mango, no jackfruit) into a small pile before gathering the sack in one hand and using the broom as a scoop to shovel them in. A grass rake or yard broom would have been far better suited to the task, but evidently no such implement was available, or perhaps the cost could not be justified. And then again, perhaps a more efficient approach to the task would have left the woman with nothing at all to do.

In any case, almost invisibly she worked her way around the small courtyard, taking special care not to disturb the man in white from his reverie, his own special version of doing something. Or nothing? The two were perhaps indistinguishable.

The man’s phone rang – a new age guitar version of the familiar Nokia tone. After the shortest of conversations he stubbed out his most recent unsmoked cigarette, gathered his possessions in a single economical movement and was gone.

The woman kept on sweeping. Gathering the banknotes from the man’s table was clearly not her job, and neither was returning the used crockery to the kitchen. For a while, the only sound in this anonymous oasis of cool was the faint brushed rhythm of the broom twigs urging the leaves into their small conical piles. Another light gust stirred the uppermost branches of the mango; a few dozen more leaves were dislodged and fluttered down to be trapped amid the rich green jackfruit web or to settle on the bare shingle below.

The woman briefly looked up and allowed the balls of her hands to settle on her hips for a brief moment of rest. Then she returned to her starting point, and resumed her work in the shade of the jackfruit and the mango.

Trevor’s life is a short attention span. He grew up by the sea and has since 1983 sought enlightenment at one of Guildford’s top universities. Careers have encompassed translation, journalism (in Stockholm, London and Canberra), communications directing (at Cadbury, Tesco and Sainsbury’s), consultancy (in Europe and the Middle East) and writing (in general). Interests include songwriting, cricket, and the futility of self-definition. Trevor lives in Woking with his wife Anne and, increasingly, his two large sons.

Emily Byfield-Riches is a twenty year old Literature student in her first year at Surrey, and has always looked to photography as a creative outlet in her free time. She’s particularly fascinated with portraiture, and this is a focus in her work, especially the exploration of self identity and uses of light and shadow.

Broc Silva is a country-born Hampshire child. ‘Home’ is the Isle of Wight. Poorly educated, yet catching up. Poor sight, terrible hair, and with chips on both shoulders, he contends with the voice: that black shroud that’s constantly nagging. He fights back with words; prose, poetry and short stories.

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http://www.staghilljournal.com/2017/12/09/about/#respondSat, 09 Dec 2017 20:13:13 +0000http://www.staghilljournal.com/?p=52Stag Hill Literary Journal is a forum for contemporary creative work. Not limited to fiction, the journal seeks to open creative discussion on pertinent social issues. We are based in Guildford, Surrey, and run by a group of postgraduate students from the University of Surrey. Submissions to the biannual print magazine will be requested for January and August; submissions to the online journal are welcome at any time.